CAPSTONE PROJECTS
Each year, ~300 Biomedical Engineering Students take Capstone and participate in Senior Design Expo at the end of the semester. Students are encouraged to continue their projects past the end of the course, to bring it one step closer to making a real difference in healthcare.
Explore the Spring 2025 Projects →
GT BME Capstone has won Best Overall Project at Capstone Design Expo FIVE semesters in a row.
In Spring 2025, Team One-Hand Wonder won Best Overall Project for their device, the RapidReach, which is a quick-adjust, one-handed surgical retractor arm.
See how past Capstone teams turned their prototypes into real-world products.
Ethos
Ethos Medical began as a Georgia Tech BME Capstone project in Spring 2018, when a team of students set out to address challenges with bedside spinal procedures. The team built their solution around a key concern: 20-42% of lumbar puncture procedures fail.
Like many Capstone teams, they quickly learned that the first problem you notice isn’t always the right one to focus on and may be rooted in a deeper issue. By stepping back, interviewing stakeholders, and testing assumptions, the group discovered a more urgent need—guiding epidural and spinal procedures with greater accuracy.
Their solution evolved into a platform-agnostic ultrasound attachment that provides real-time needle navigation, helping clinicians visualize and guide procedures with greater precision.
Following Capstone, Cassidy Wang, Dev Mandavia, and Lucas Muller, continued to transform the project into a startup. Ethos Medical continued to win the 2019 InVenture Prize at Georiga Tech. This milestone enabled them to file a patent, fund cadaveric and animal testing, and expand their network of clinical and business mentors, accelerating product development and commercialization.
The team navigated multiple pivots – both technical and market-driven – as they refined the product for clinical use. Beyond engineering innovation, the team gained experience in regulatory strategy, fundraising, and commercialization planning, skills that transformed the Capstone experience into a viable venture.
Ethos Medical continued through CREATE-X and ATDC where the startup continued to progress using federal SBIR/STTR grants.
Ethos Medical credits much of its progress to its network of mentors, clinicians, and industry partners, many of whom were first connected through Georgia Tech’s Capstone ecosystem.
Today, Ethos Medical is raising a bridge round to accelerate development and bring its guidance technology closer to market, continuing the journey that began in the Capstone program.
PatchPals
PatchPals began in the BME Capstone Program in Spring 2024, when a team of BME students set out to design a better bandage. The team started their customer discovery and quickly uncovered a deeper challenge—how time-consuming and error-prone it can be to manually cut foam dressings for Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (NPWT).
PatchPals pivoted to focus on that unmet need and developed an automated system that simplifies the process. PatchPals allows nurses and technicians to take a photo of a wound, outline it, and have the device cut a precise foam dressing in just 15 seconds. This innovation streamlines care, reduces variability between users, and improves efficiency for healthcare providers.
Their progress quickly gained recognition. PatchPals won Best of BME at the Spring 2024 Capstone Expo and continued development through the Advanced Capstone course. The team was then featured in Forbes for its AI-powered wound segmentation model, which was trained using resources from Georgia Tech’s AI Makerspace. In Summer 2025, PatchPals joined Georgia Tech’s Create-X startup incubator to further explore entrepreneurial and commercialization pathways.
The PatchPals Team, Aya Samadi, Deniz Onalir, Valeria Perez, Hayden Johnson, Ethan Cantrell, and Felipe Oliveira, are continuing to advance their technology through a special topics course in the BME Capstone Program, refining their minimum viable product.
PatchPals represents the spirit of Georgia Tech BME—transforming classroom innovation into real-world healthcare impact.
Air Detective
Air Detective began in Fall 2024 in the BME Capstone Program, where a team of students set out to solve a critical surgical challenge: detecting air leaks in real time during cardiothoracic procedures.
In current practice, surgeons rely on the saline bubble test to identify air leaks, a subjective and time-consuming method that often misses smaller leaks. Through extensive interviews with thoracic surgeons and other clinical experts, the team discovered a clear opportunity to bring objectivity and precision to this process. Their solution, Air Detective, is a spectroscopy-based intraoperative detection system that provides real-time insight into air leaks, helping surgeons ensure complete lung seal integrity and reduce post-operative complications.
The team won Best Overall Project at the Fall 2024 Capstone Design Expo, earning them a Golden Ticket to advance to Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize competition. Isabella Turner, Alondra Torres, and Paola Troconis founded their startup, Haven Science, to continue developing Air Detective while in Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X startup accelerator, where they began transforming the project into a medical device venture.
They are currently refining the device in Advance Capstone while also validating their development with clinicians from Emory and Wellstar Health System. Upcoming milestones include bench testing, preclinical validation, and pilot clinical trials.
With roots in the BME Capstone Program and support from CREATE-X, Haven Science is advancing a tool that can redefine thoracic surgery—enabling faster detection, fewer complications, and better outcomes for patients worldwide.
carSEAL
When a person suffers a stroke, every second matters. For one Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering Capstone team, that urgency became the driving force behind their project — a device that could make stroke treatment faster, safer, and more effective.
Working with the Mayo Clinic, the team – Derek Prusener, Giancarlo Riccobono, Joshua Cruz, Nicholas Lima, and Shovan Bhatia – set out to tackle a critical challenge in stroke care: how to reduce the time it takes to perform a thrombectomy, the life-saving procedure that removes a blood clot from the brain.
Their solution, carSEAL, was designed to quickly and safely close the carotid artery after a thrombectomy, helping surgeons move efficiently without compromising patient safety.
From the start, the team fully embraced the engineering design process. They observed real procedures at the Mayo Clinic, defined user needs in collaboration with physicians, brainstormed dozens of concepts, and rapidly iterated on their prototypes – each version bringing them closer to a viable clinical solution.
Their dedication quickly translated into results. Within just one semester, carSEAL had:
- Won the Alligator Tank Pitch Competition at Mayo Clinic Jacksonville
- Advanced to and won the Walleye Tank Pitch Competition at Mayo Clinic Rochester
- Earned Best Overall Project at Georgia Tech’s Capstone Expo
The team’s success didn’t stop there. Continuing their work in Advanced Capstone, they refined their design further and ultimately went on to win the 2022 ACC InVenture Prize. One team member noted that “You get out of Capstone what you put into it. We treated it like a real product, and it opened so many doors.”
Throughout the process, the carSEAL team learned that the Capstone experience is more than an academic exercise – it’s a true reflection of how medical devices are developed in the real world.